A Long Line of Dead Men

"Yes," she said. "I'll call you immediately, rest assured." She frowned at the sketch. "Definitely yellow. His name, I mean. John, in yellow script, over the left breast pocket."

The superintendent at the Kashin Building didn't recognize the sketch, and it turned out he hadn't been working there at the time of Fred Karp's death. I went to the management company's office on West Thirty-seventh Street. Nobody there recognized the sketch, either, but a young woman checked personnel records and came up with an employee named John Siebert. He had started work five months before Karp's death and quit three weeks after. Under "Reason for Leaving," she told me, it said "Moving to Florida."

"I guess he decided to retire," she said.

Hal Gabriel had been reclusive toward the end of his life, rarely leaving his apartment, ordering in from the Chinese restaurant and the liquor store. There were half a dozen Chinese restaurants within a few blocks of his building at Ninety-second and West End. I didn't know which ones had been in business twelve years ago when Gabriel was found hanged, but I hadn't yet known of a Chinese restaurant that employed Caucasian delivery boys.

I checked the two liquor stores a block east on Broadway. Both had had recent changes of ownership. One had changed hands when the owner retired and moved to Miami. The owner of the other had been killed five years before in a robbery. No one in either store recognized James Shorter from the sketch.

I had TJ along and we worked opposite sides of the street, showing the sketch in coffee shops and pizza parlors. The counterman at Poseidon looked at it and said, "Haven't seen him in years and years. Two scrambled dry, toasted English no butter." He grinned at the expression on my face. "Good memory, huh?"

Almost too good. I complimented him on it and went outside, and TJ reported the dry cleaner across the street had also made Shorter from the sketch, and recalled that his name was Smith.

"Right, Smith," I said. "And he didn't want any butter on his English muffin."

"Huh?"

"Smith? And he happened to remember the guy from twelve years ago?"

"Was a woman," TJ said. "An' she remembers him because he never came back for his suit jacket. Lady kept it for him for years, finally gave it to the Goodwill sometime last year. Soon as I showed her the picture, she got scared she's gonna get in trouble. 'I kep' it a long time,' she said."

No one in Hal Gabriel's building recognized the sketch, nor did the list of 1981 tenants suggest anything. But there was an SRO hotel around the corner, and an old desk register showed that a Joseph Smith had occupied a room on the fourth floor for several months prior to Gabriel's death. A week after the body was discovered, Mr. Smith moved out and left no forwarding address.

Rumpelstiltskin.

I thought of him often, the evil dwarf from the fairy tale. I didn't know what Shorter had meant by the clue, or if it was in fact a clue at all. I followed a lot of very cold trails, looking for further traces of his presence near the scene of other deaths.

It didn't matter. Nothing led anywhere.

I have been detecting one way or another for so long that certain parts of the process have become virtually automatic for me. Now and then in recent years I have looked around for some other way to make a living, and invariably I have realized that this is what I do, that I am reasonably good at it, and that my experience and talent equip me for nothing else.

And yet I don't begin to understand it.

Sometimes it's reasonably straightforward. You go up one side of the street and down the other, you knock on every door, figuratively and literally, and each new piece of data clicks into place and points you toward a new street, with new doors to knock on. Finally you've walked down enough streets and knocked on enough doors, and the final door opens and there's your answer. It's not easy and it's rarely simple, but there is a logic to the way it unfolds.

But it's not always like that.

Sometimes it's like a jigsaw puzzle. You separate all the straight-edged pieces and get the outside hooked together, and then you sort by color, and you try this and try that until you've made a little progress. And you're looking for a certain piece, and it's not there. It's got to be missing, and you want to write the manufacturer and complain, and then you pick up a piece you've already tried in that particular spot three or four times already, and you know it's not the one you're looking for, but this time it fits.

It's not always like that, either.

Jim Shorter, aka Joseph Smith, aka John Siebert. Aka Rumpelstiltskin?

"Maybe he stole some monogrammed luggage," Elaine suggested, "and he can't bear to part with it."

"The places he lives," I said, "you'd be conspicuous if you moved in with shopping bags from a good store. He does like to hold on to those initials, though. What does JS stand for?"

"Joan Scherman."

"Who's Joan Scherman?"